(September 20, 2022 at 12:01 pm)Jehanne Wrote:(September 20, 2022 at 11:39 am)polymath257 Wrote: Well, there is no doubt about the Islamic aspects of the qibla and spherical trigonometry. There is no doubt that the development of the 'arabic' number system, especially how computations were done, was an Islamic achievement. For a while, there was a very active Islamic philosophical tradition.
This came crashing down when Al Ghazali started to argue against philosophical discussion in general and anything 'non-Islamic' more generally. Whether you want to label Al Ghazali as a fundamentalist, his position became dominant and shut down the investigations that had been done up to that point, severely restricting what could and what could not be discussed. Fortunately, the centers at Cordoba were not as swayed by his arguments and continued to engage in intellectual activity long enough for the translation movement in Europe to copy the most important texts into Latin so they could be discussed in European universities.
As for the battle of Tours, I am not familiar enough with the details to say whether it was a 'raiding party' or not. But it is clear that the Islamic advances in territory stopped rather soon after that battle.
No one (including me) is doubting that Islam had amazing scholars; all that I am claiming is that Islam succeeded where Western Catholicism failed, namely, in suppressing the logical outcome of Greek science, which laid the foundations of the Italian Renaissance ultimately leading to the Enlightenment.
I do not know enough about Al Ghazali; if he led a "revolution", it was certainly a quiet one; even The Glorious Revolution centuries later in England was well remembered, even though it was bloodless, something quite atypical of the power struggles all throughout medieval Islam.
As for the Battle of Tours, such was not a raiding party. Two armies of 20 to 30K men each stared at each other for 8 days straight, with the Muslims having men on horseback with the Franks on foot. On the 8th day the former charged 3 times, each time being repelled, before the Franks got into gear before killing thousands. A decisive battle for Western Europe concluded shortly thereafter.
Hmmm... the 'logical outcome' of Greek mathematics was something that needed to be changed. The Greeks, after the discovery of irrational ratios, had a split between numbers and geometry that was a significant hindrance to the development of mathematics. It was Islamic scholars that *started* the reunification of those two subjects (the simple example of a 'number line' is one that no Greek mathematician would have allowed and is due to an Islamic scholar). the Italian renaissance and subsequent enlightenment relied heavily on texts that were translated from Arabic and the ideas elaborated from those texts by Islamic scholars.
Al Ghazali was anything but quiet. His arguments were the prime ones that lead to the suppression of the philosophers and those willing to integrate 'foreign science' into their system.
Again, I am not an expert on the battle of Tours, but what you relate seems plausible given what I do know. But it is impossible to claim that the Islamic culture of Cordoba was not highly intellectual, free to scholars of other faiths, and immensely important to the subsequent rise of learning in Christian Europe.
